sticism, with the
distorted metaphysics, which fill the discourses of John, would speak
loudly enough. This by no means implies that there are not in the
discourses of John some admirable gleams, some traits which truly come
from Jesus.[2] But the mystic tone of these discourses does not
correspond at all to the character of the eloquence of Jesus, such as
we picture it according to the synoptics. A new spirit has breathed;
Gnosticism has already commenced; the Galilean era of the kingdom of
God is finished; the hope of the near advent of Christ is more
distant; we enter on the barrenness of metaphysics, into the darkness
of abstract dogma. The spirit of Jesus is not there, and, if the son
of Zebedee has truly traced these pages, he had certainly, in writing
them, quite forgotten the Lake of Gennesareth, and the charming
discourses which he had heard upon its shores.

[Footnote 1: See, for example, chaps. ix. and xi. Notice especially,
the effect which such passages as John xix. 35, xx. 31, xxi. 20-23,
24, 25, produce, when we recall the absence of all comments which
distinguishes the synoptics.]

[Footnote 2: For example, chap. iv. 1, and following, xv. 12, and
following. Many words remembered by John are found in the synoptics
(chap. xii. 16, xv. 20).]

One circumstance, moreover, which strongly proves that the discourses
given us by the fourth Gospel are not historical, but compositions
intended to cover with the authority of Jesus certain doctrines dear
to the compiler, is their perfect harmony with the intellectual state
of Asia Minor at the time when they were written. Asia Minor was then
the theatre of a strange movement of syncretical philosophy; all the
germs of Gnosticism existed there already. John appears to have drunk
deeply from these strange springs. It may be that, after the crisis of
the year 68 (the date of the Apocalypse) and of the year 70 (the
destruction of Jerusalem), the old apostle, with an ardent and plastic
spirit, disabused of the belief in a near appearance of the Son of Man
in the clouds, may have inclined toward the ideas that he found around
him, of which several agreed sufficiently well with certain Christian
doctrines. In attributing these new ideas to Jesus, he only followed a
very natural tendency. Our remembrances are transformed with our
circumstances; the ideal of a person that we have known changes as we
change.[1] Considering Jesus as the incarnation of truth, John could
not